Wednesday, November 28, 2012

What's That Noise?

What is this blog about? I'm not too sure about that myself. I play a lot of DnD, and I think about a lot of DnD. So, one reason to have this blog is to have a place to put my thoughts in order. Another reason is to share with the internet-people.

I have three settings.

Centerra is the stereotypical fantasy setting. All the unicorns are rotting abominations, the richest person on the planet is a dragon merchant, and psychic dragons control the dreamscape from a vast subterranean ocean. Some of the highest level things around are orcs. You can climb to the moon by climbing its dangling tail. Most of the world is monotheistic, and worships Iasu, the blue-winged angel. The calendar starts in the Time of Fire and Madness, when everything was on fire and everyone was insane. Pretty standard fare.

Magic is rare, there are no apparent gods, no teleports, resurrection, or even undead in the normal sense. I'd call it gritty fantasy if there wasn't so much weird shit in it. Themes are cliche-punting, transformation, subtle post-apocalypse, evil humanity, sex, and decay. I also try to keep it "hard fantasy", where everything is internally consistent and makes strict sense given the laws of the world. Which makes it hard to fit all of the gonzo shit in, but that's why I have other settings.

Duscuro is infested with gods and flirting with aliens. Formerly a "nature reserve" established by vast and ancient (but still mostly human) powers, the planet was guaranteed to remain in a natural, uncivilized state because 1) the humans were engineered to be idiots, 2) dragons were engineered to wreck everyone's shit as soon as people started stacking bricks, and 3) there's a set of immortal fleshbrain death satellites ringing the world that will drop lasery sky-death as soon as there is any deviation from the accepted norm. All of these failsafes failed spectacularly very quickly, and part of the campaign consists of figuring out why.

Gods are tangible, accessible rulers, who speak through wooden manikins. They rule city-states like kings, not some distant ethos. One of them, the god of warfare and agriculture, exists on the material plane like any other schmuck in order to better enjoy the things he loves. The gods wage wars against each other in order to stamp out the loser's religion and absorb their portfolios. All of this takes place under a pair of binary suns that cause four-year winters when the colder sun revolves in front of the warm sun. This is bad, because there are tribes of things in the mountains--half of them are undead, half of them are alive, but you'd need a doctor to tell the difference--who get all Genghis Khan when it gets cold, and start trampling cities under their ultra-mammoths made from normal mammoth corpses.

Noxious America is 1930's America forty years after the fall of humanity due to sudden, cataclysmic immigration of "gods" from tentacled dimensions It's a mix of Lovecraft and maybe even pokemon and noir. And definitely a lot of Americana. But it's not post-apocalyptic. Humanity has fallen, but other things have risen in their place. It's a time of optimism, dance halls, gangsters, speakeasies, gnashing death, droning abysms of madness, and writhing degeneration in dark corners. From Satan's gigantic, poisonous corpse in Arizona to Skethriman Scolex's combustible corpulence hovering over Fatland. It's last call for the human race, before the doors lock behind us and we face the night.